Terms used in Mircea Eliade'sThe Sacred and the Profane,The Nature of Religion

Mircea Eliade uses many terms in and from several languages in his classic book, The Sacred and the Profane [Harvest/HBJ, 1959], which applied Rudolf Otto's theory of numinosity to a variety of religious phenomena. It deals with aspects of religion and thus is really rather narrower than the title, "The Nature of Religion," might suggest. Here is a selection of his vocabulary that may be unfamiliar to students (who no longer have routinely taken Classical languages like Latin and Greek, let alone Arabic). This is based on a shorter list compiled by my colleagues Lisa Raskind and Gunar Freibergs at Los Angeles Valley College. Words used as foreign words are in italics, English words and coinages are not.

ab initio

from the beginning (Latin)

ab origine

at/from the beginning (Latin)

aiones, aeva

eons, ages (Greek & Latin)

anthropo-cosmic

human-universal (Greek)

anthropophagy

eating people, cannibalism (Greek)

autochthony

orgin or birth in the land itself (Greek)

axis mundi

center of the world, cosmic pillar (Latin)

cipher

a code (cf. decipher)

coincidentia oppositorum

coincidence of opposites (Latin)

conjugal

having to do with marriage, especially the sexual relationship of marriage

consecrate/sanctify

ritually render sacred

cosmogony

the mythic creation (birth) of the world (Greek)

cosmological

having to do with the universe, its structure

demiurge

("people's worker") a creator deity or a subordinate, non-ultimate creator deity or being (Greek, from Plato's Timaeus)

desacralize

render or become unsacred (/profane)

epiphany

appearance, manifestation of anything, but especially something divine, as of the infant Jesus on January 6 (Greek)

existential

a subjective sense of reality or existence, having to do with Existentialism